Archives

The VSData team blogs about new database features with SQL Server Express and Visual Studio 2005. Apparently when an SSE database is added to the VS project and the project is built, the MDF gets copied to the build directory along with the EXE. When the application runs, the framework automatically finds the MDF in the application directory.

Dan Fernandez blogs a reminder that generics are not CLS compliant in the .NET Framework 2.0. Apparently to make them so would put too large an onus on CLS language developers. This news worried me back when I first heard it, and it still worries me. It worries me on two fronts. As a component developer, it forces me to make some decisions when designing my APIs. Let's say I have an API that could take advantage of generics to make it more extensible or elegant. So do I

Jim Gries blogs about the enhanced Datatips in Visual Studio 2005 (damn it's hard to stop saying Visual Studio .NET). Somehow this improvement had escaped my attention previously. All I can say is - wow, wicked cool. Even his screen shot doesn't do the feature justice - this is one of the coolest debugger enhancements I've seen in a very long time. I use QuickWatch a ton, and I can easily see this replacing QuickWatch for 90% of my debugging needs. It definitely gives visualizers a run for their money as the coolest debugging enhancement in VS2005.

This weekend I had the need to do some very basic audio editing. I had no software for doing this, but a quick Google turned up Audacity, an open source audio editing package. It let me do everything I needed to do, and is quite easy to use. Recommended.

About 8 months ago, I got a snazzy new development machine at work. From the get-go, I had a peculiar problem – when I opened a bunch of Internet Explorer windows, my machine started going wonky. Actually, the problem wasn’t caused just by IE, but it seemed like IE triggered it more readily. The issue manifested itself as a progression of increasingly worsening UI problems. The first sign of trouble is that the IE toolbars would rearrange themselves. Specifically, the Links toolbar would move from the bottom of the toolbar stack (where I like it) back to the default location (collapsed, to the right of the address bar). If I kept opening windows, the problem would progress to where new IE windows would display without a menu bar, or would sometimes hang and would need to be killed. If I (foolishly) kept opening windows, things really went haywire. Windows became incapable of popping up any new windows. Context menus wouldn’t display, the Start Menu wouldn’t pop up, grouped start menu items couldn’t be selected, etc. Closing open windows would usually restore the system to some semblance of usability, but I usually ended up rebooting at some point, if only for my peace of mind. Needless to say, this was very frustrating.

James Newkirk blogs a Hello World unit test sample for Visual Studio Team System. I'm guessing it's no accident that the test code looks a lot like NUnit test code - making it easy to migrate unit tests from NUnit to VSTS makes a lot of sense. However, if I had my druthers, I'd change one thing. I've never liked the fact that the comparison Assert methods (e.g. Assert.AreEqual) take the expected value as the first argument and the actual value as the second. That just feels backward to me. Assert.AreEqual(9, theValue) reads to me like “if (9 == theValue)”. I just don't think that way, and I frequently find myself reversing the parameters inadvertantly. Unfortunately, that change would complicate the migration from NUnit to VSTS, and so probably isn't feasable.

The Whidbey May CTP documentation describes a new IDE feature called Object Test Bench. It sounds like this allows you to create instances of objects and poke at them in the design environment, without having to create a test project and write code. Looks neat, but either it isn't hooked up yet or I just can't figure out how to work it. Anybody know?